JACKASS NUMBER TWO

US, 2006, 92 minutes.
Johnny Knoxville, Steve- O.
Directed by Jeff Tremaine.

One of the most irritating things one can see on screen is a group of grown men laughing uproariously at idiotic pranks that they have pulled on one another – and their expecting us to laugh just as much.

Actually grown men is not quite correct: physically grown (and there is far too much evidence of this) but psychologically and emotionally grown (very little evidence of this).

Anyone who pays to see the Jackass films knows exactly what they are going to get: a group led by Johnny Knoxville getting up to a host of humiliating and/or pain-inducing stunts, many of which are body functional. Given that they make each other the butt of jokes (with an extraordinary number of jokes of butt) and that women are almost absent from these proceedings (some of which are literally anal retentive), it would be interesting to hear what a Freudian psychologist would say about the proceedings.

Anyone of an introverted disposition will shudder at some of the episodes. Anyone of an intuitive disposition will be horrified at some of the very sensate and down-to-earth stunts. But, it is a model of respectability compared with its British counterpart, Dirty Sanchez – the Movie. (However, the reviewer – a woman in her twenties – in the London Metro gave Jackass Number Two five stars and had it on top of the recommended list for the week, referring to it as coming ‘near to cinema purity’. Purity is not the first word that comes to mind in watching Jackass movies.)

GRIZZLY MAN

US, 2005, 103 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Werner Herzog.

After watching this documentary, I was surprised to see how enthusiastic quotes on the advertising and in the press notes emphasised its impact as a nature documentary. Yes, there are many extraordinary scenes and some unique footage of grizzly bears captured in the Alaskan national parks and audiences who enjoy this kind of film or television program (especially on the Discovery Channel which has co-produced Grizzly Man).

But, audiences may well leave the cinema with quite a different impression. The Grizzly Man is Timothy Treadwell, an American who spent thirteen summers with the grizzlies, who saw himself as their protector against poachers and negligent authorities, who toured schools and became a media celebrity informing the public about the bears.

Director Werner Herzog is one of the great mavericks of cinema. For more than forty years he has made a succession of fictions and documentaries that explore eccentricity, ego, obsessions and madness. Often with a rough and ready style, he has made his audiences look quite differently at the world and people on the margin. So, it is no surprise to find him intrigued by the life and death of Timothy Treadwell.

Herzog does a constant voiceover commentary, investing himself and his perspective in the film and the portrait of Treadwell. What Herzog does is to lead us on a journey, observing and sharing Treadwell’s disintegration of personality. With footage from his many videos, with comments from friends and critics, Herzog empathises at first with Treadwell, then moves to a critique of his work and self-imposed mission. We discover a former alcoholic who took drugs, who invented an Australian background for himself (he was from Long Island) who broke the regulations about keeping distance from the grizzlies, who expressed his rage against civilisation with more and more disturbing intensity and exhibited traits of self-agrandisement and delusions of grandeur.

We know from the outset that Timothy Treadwell and his companions were killed by a grizzle, so we are aware that we are contemplating a finished life and its meaning. His friends are loyal. Critics say that he did not understand how he could be altering the bears’ attitudes towards humans, that he personalised them in a way that did not correspond to their animal and hunting realities.

Herzog himself has shown some of these traits in his films: the megalomaniacs in Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo and the documentary about his stormy relationship with the star of these films, the manic Klaus Kinski, in My Special Fiend. Grizzly Man is a nature film, but it is also a psychiatric case-study.

A BITTERSWEET LIFE

Korea, 2005, 120 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Kim Jee-woon.

The title of this powerful Korean gangster drama is somewhat misleading. There is no sweetness. It is all bitter.

Kim Jee-woon is one of those directors, along with Chan-wook Park, who have made something of an art form out of vengeance tragedies for Korean cinema. It is often disconcerting while watching films like this to realise that one is very impressed by the craft, energy and passion that has gone into the making of the film while appalled at the behaviour, especially the violence and bloodshed, that is up there on the screen. Obviously, revenge tragedies are not for those of squeamish sensitivities.

The enigmatic hero whose life is bittersweet is a very dapper young man who is proud of his security job in a hotel owned by his gangster-patron. Well-mannered, elegant but whose expressions give very little away, he can suddenly burst into martial arts violence when wanting to control a situation. He sees himself as cultured and far superior to other henchmen and thugs.

He would tell you, were you to ask, that he has no flaws. He is the completely loyal employee. When asked to intervene in the boss’s girlfriend’s affair, he lets them go, not thinking that there would be major repercussions. There are. He falls foul of his boss’s resentment that he did not obey him to the letter. He falls foul of the other thugs. He falls foul of the rival gang and their security guards. Mayhem ensues – which is a polite way of saying that all hell breaks loose for him and he replies in kind. He slaughters most of those who pursue him, using wits and skills and a minor armoury. But he continues bewildered as to why the boss is doing this to him.

The ending is bitter, not sweet, taking its cue from the endings of the revenge tragedies of Jacobean theatre. And, what is the audience left with? Vicarious thrills at the violence? Or a lesson in the futility of violence?

LADY VENGEANCE/ SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE

Korea, 2005, 112 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Chan-wook Park.

One of the features of Korean cinema for almost the last ten years is that it has gone beyond martial arts to a proliferation of violent vengeance thrillers. Kim Ki Duk was an exponent of this kind of film before he moved to more contemplative dramas and thrillers. Kim Jee-woon does it all very stylishly so that you could feel quite guilty watching the ingenuity and style of a gangster film like A Bittersweet Life. Chan-wook Park has a worldwide reputation as well as at home. After making what looks like the beginnings of a trilogy with Sympathy for Mr Vengeance in 2001, he won the jury prize at Cannes, 2004, when (probably no surprise to see this) Quentin Tarantino headed the Jury with Old Boy. Now comes a third film, Lady Vengeance (chosen for the competition in Venice, 2005). It is stylish, thoughtful, violent.

Best to quote the director himself on his themes and gauge whether his words accurately describe his films. The main character in Old Boy says, ‘Seeking revenge is the only cure for someone who has been hurt”. The presumption is that this is the director’s own view. He says, emphatically, that it is not. ‘My view of vengeance has not changed… I still think it is the most foolish thing you can do. Revenge will do nothing to bring back what you have lost. It’s quite a simple concept, even children understand it, but adults, and sometimes even whole states, seem compelled to engage in these acts of violence’.

In the films, the central character has been cruelly victimised by an unscrupulous enemy. Old Boy has been incomprehensibly imprisoned for years and finds himself suddenly set loose and let loose. Lady Vengeance has spent thirteen years in prison, seeming the angel of kindness while all the time harbouring deep resentment and forming a network of fellow prisoners who will aid here when she is set loose and will pursue the man who destroyed her life. She meticulously goes about her plan. She was imprisoned for abducting and killing a child. The real killer has, meanwhile, killed again and again. Lady Vengeance assembles the grieving parents, along with the powerless police inspector, and tells them that the law will not do them justice. What follows is a horrific, almost ritual killing – although it is in the same vein, really, as Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.

Where Lady Vengeance illustrates the director’s stance on the futility and the personal destructiveness of vengeance is in the use of the classical musical score and the times of quiet that the audience are given where they have an opportunity to get over the adrenalin rush or the horrified reaction and sit and contemplate what they have seen and felt before they leave the theatre. The revenge tragedy was a feature of the bloodthirsty era of Elizabethan and Jacobean times (think Hamlet). What does the revenge tragedy in Asian films say about our times?

DATE MOVIE

US, 2006, 83 minutes, Colour.
Allyson Hannigan, Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge, Carmen Electra, tony cox.
Directed by Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer.

Yes, Scary Movie-like spoofing of romantic comedies, and crassly. No real reason to see it as it is not particularly funny and the send-ups show how good some of the originals were – although Jennifer Coolidge does a great Barbra Streisand in Meet the Fockers.

The main thing to do if you are a movie buff is to indulge in Trivial Pursuit making sure you have all the references, which include My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Shallow Hal, Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers, Mr and Mrs Smith, Hitch, The Wedding Planner, The Wedding Crashers, Dodgeball, Jerry Maguire and a weak King Kong finale.

THE PIANO TUNER OF EARTHQUAKES

UK, 2005, 99 minutes, Colour.
Amira Cassar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna.
Directed by Timothy and Stephen Quay.

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is an exotic and difficult film. It was written and directed by the Quay Brothers, an American set of twins, Timothy and Stephen Quay, who went to London Royal College of Art and made short films. They have remained in England after a return to the United States where they worked as book illustrators. They used puppets and miniature objects in the various short films, experimental films, music videos, set design for theatre, ballet and opera. Their first feature film was Institut Benjamenta, 1995, a combination of live action and animation.

These influences are clearly seen in The Piano Tuner. In one sense, the film is less of a movie than a video installation, a moving work of art that could be viewed as people walk through a museum rather than sit in a cinema watching a narrative unfold. There are all kinds of experimental designs, machines, varying grades of colour and lack of colour to give the film its unreal atmosphere. This is an extreme example of magic realism.

The plot is difficult to follow: it focuses on an opera star about to be married, her being murdered on stage. A doctor, Dr Droz, takes her corpse to his laboratory by the ocean. He is a maker of musical automata. He also employs a piano tuner to look after his objects. Also in the household is a seductive and maternal housekeeper. The piano tuner becomes entranced with his work, with the song that he hears – only to discover that it is the opera singer brought to life and the doctor’s intention is to have her sing in his diabolical opera. He falls in love with her – and the audience realises that he is the same actor who portrayed the opera singer’s fiance.

The film is unusual, beautiful to look at in its different kind of way. Amira Cassar (The Anatomy of Hell) is the opera singer, Gottfried John, a veteran of many films as a German character is the doctor and Spanish Assumpta Serna as the housekeeper.

The film can be appreciated as an avant garde experiment rather than as a film of entertainment.

DER FREIE WILLE (THE FREE WILL)

Germany, 2006, 165 minutes, Colour.
Jurgen Vogel, Andre Hennicke.
Directed by Matthias Glasner.

The film opens with a man in his 20s gazing out to a cold sea on a bleak beach, wind blowing. Another of those European tales of existential angst. And this opening is not misleading. This is a 165 minutes close-up of a man who is minimally sympathetic, of his obsessions, his angers, his pathology, his attempts to come to terms with himself and his failure. The large philosophical question is: has this man free will for his actions and his moral decisions or is he programmed or is he continually impeded by his fragile and disturbed mental states. Can he be redeemed?

This being a German film, there are no obvious or, especially, happy answers.

Not everyone will be able to watch this film in all its detail. After a visceral scene of eruptive anger, Theo (Jurgen Vogel) rapes a woman on the beach, more viciously than we really would like to see. He is arrested and serves a gaol sentence. He has taken medication to control his libido and has been allowed to go off it. Is it possible for him to change his basic drives? Is it possible to control them?

Free Will keeps us in Theo’s company for almost three hours. He is certainly not a person we would like to be acquainted with. Yet, the film asks us to be with him, to understand as best we can, to wonder what can be done. As with paedophilia, is rage rape a drive that can be cured? Must we be realistic and pessimistic? And if so, what does society do? What do authorities do?

The other two characters at the centre of the film are a damaged man who serves as a companion/counsellor and Nettie, escaping from a dominating and possibly abusive father, who falls in love with Theo. At first repelled, she finds the good in him and hopes that she can help him.

The end is overwhelmingly downbeat, fatalistic.

THESE FOOLISH THINGS

UK, 2005, 107 minutes, Colour.
Zoe Tapper, Anjelica Huston, Andrew Lincoln, David Leon, Leo Bill, Terence Stamp, Lauren Bacall.
Directed by Julia Taylor- Stanley.

This may not be your glass of Dom Perignon (there is more of that around in this film than cups of tea, except for the poor actors who live in lower class digs, living in hope of getting and audition and a part). The setting is London, 1938-1939, the world of the West End theatre, the more genteel end while Mrs Henderson was operating the Windmill just around the corner from Shaftsbury Ave.

This film is a labour of love for the writer-director, Julia Taylor- Stanley, who has adapted a 1930s novel by Noel Langley, There’s a Porpoise Close Behind Us. However, she has so situated the screenplay in those times that it comes across very much as an anachronism: nostalgia for those who love the period, quaint (at least) for those who are unfamiliar with it. However, it is often salted a little (from the prevailing more sugary taste) by some intimations of the gay world and camp language and behaviour.

It comes across as Mills and Boon filtered through Stephen Fry.

An aspiring young actress (Zoe Tapper), daughter of a theatrical diva, tries for a career, is attracted towards a young playwright while falling in love with a sympathetic director. A vain, gay leading man tries to humiliate her and seduce the playwright. Her jealously obnoxious cousin creates mischief. However, a wealthy American entrepreneur (Anjelica Huston), the grande dame of the theatre (Lauren Bacall) and a sardonic butler (Terence Stamp) are on her side – even after her extraordinarily unconvincing audition as Ophelia which the screenplay says is marvellous.

They did talk like that in those days and in the films of those days, but now…?

SUPERHERO MOVIE

US, 2008, 75 minutes, Colour.
Drake Bell, Leslie Nielsen, Sara Paxton, Christopher Mc Donald, Kevin Hart, Keith David, Robert Hays, Robert Joy, Jeffrey Tambor, Brent Spiner, Tracy Morgan.
Directed by Craig Mazin.

After all the Scary/Date/Not Another Teenage/Epic Movie spoofs, plus Meet the Spartans, we know, more or less, what to expect from these send-ups of popular films and anything else that comes to the screenwriter’s or director’s mind.

They are corny, inexpensive skits with a functional lookalike cast (but this time we also have Leslie Nielson as well as Uncle Albert with some really crass remarks in Nielson’s deadpan style), some really corny jokes, quite a number of bodily function jokes, some spot-on satire and generally a hit or miss approach to the humour. They are short and the custom is to have about ten minutes of more plot and a number of out-takes after the final credits, much of which is often funnier than the film. Here the out-takes seem like an alternate (and sometimes better) screenplay.

Not so long after Meet the Spartans and the send-up of 300 (and a lot of US TV shows), we now have a poke at the Spiderman series, a key-scene from Batman Begins, an X- Men interlude and a dollop of the Fantastic Four. Needless to say, Drake Bell as our hero, Rick Riker (instead of Peter Parker), is not the most super of superheroes. On a school tour, he is bitten by a genetically-engineered dragonfly and becomes Dragonfly, a Spiderman would-be, except he can’t fly. (This leads to some interviews with celebrities about flying, the best one being with a Tom Cruise impersonator – he looks the part and is really one of the best imitators for a long time – and there is more of his work in the out-takes than in the film itself, which is a real bonus.) Robert Joy is the Stephen Hawking parody – heavy but clever.

Sarah Paxton plays the Kirsten Dunst lookalike and follows the Spiderman scenario quite closely as does Rick Riker’s aunt. The villain gets a lot of time and some good lines and is played by Christopher Mc Donald for even more than it is worth. Needless to say, he is an evil scientist.

The flashback to Rick’s ineptitude in causing the deaths of his parents is a spoof of Batman Begins. And the tour of Professor Xavier’s academy gets some parody of the X- Men films.

As usual, you have to have seen the originals to follow these parodies and to appreciate whether the jokes hit their mark or not. Not a really great laugh-out-loud film (except in the post-credits material) but amusingly silly.

COLLEGE ROAD TRIP

US, 2008, 83 minutes, Colour.
Martin Lawrence, Raven Symone.
Directed by Roger Kumble.

This is a G-rated Disney film for audiences of the Disney Channel (where Raven-Symone? has been a child star and has her own series) and those who enjoyed High School Musical films. (It is probably safe to say that those who do not enjoy Disney Channel movies and series will find this comedy too basic, too sentimental, too predictable). On the other hand, if you are in a good mood, it is lightly amusing, though there are reservations about the amount of teenage girl screaming that goes on when friends get together, go on trips or have sleepovers.

And then there is Martin Lawrence. And then there is Donny Osmond.

Martin Lawrence plays a devoted father who thinks he is the model of love, care and communication but who is really a control freak who can’t see that his daughter (Raven- Symone) is 17 and on her way to college (the college where he wants her to go, not far from home). When she gets an offer of a place at prestigious Georgetown and wants to go with her girlfriends for her interview, Daddy insists on taking her (and her precocious stowaway brother who has secret plans for technology for the State Department and is accompanied by his chess-playing, toilet-trained (almost) pig friend, Albert).

Of course, most things that can go wrong, do go wrong, including car breakdown, travelling on a bus with Asian tourists, completely destroying a wedding party (well, the pig started it) and Dad finishing up in jail for trespassing at the sorority house. Of course, all things that can go right, do go right, including getting to the interview one minute ahead of time (after father and daughter sky dive into Georgetown, their first jump!). And reconciliation all round.

And Donny Osmond. He portrays an impossibly cheerful American ultra-extravert father whose daughter is a chip off the old block (and so is Mum when we finally see her). They have the habit of breaking into songs from musicals at every cheerful moment (when they off a lift ‘Getting to Know You; when they leave, Goodbye, Auf Wiedersehn, Adieu etc).

But Donny Osmond does get the final joke of the film which is a good one that sums up the heavily portrayed lesson about parents letting children grow up and be themselves.